From Belgrade we took the bus to Sarajevo, where we met Sarah, a Kiwi friend of mine who decided to live here. It's a wonderful city with a tragic history, like most of the former Yugoslavia, with the three main religions Islam, Serbian Orthodox and Roman Catholic existing side by side in a dreamy valley along the Miljacka river.

Roses of Sarajevo monuments to the bloody war

Cemetaries for some of the more than ten thousand Sarajevo victims of the Bosnian War

Though a beautiful view of the city

Fantastic vegetarian food at Karuzo restaurant

Typical Sarajevo trams

We hired a car then to make a roadtrip to Montenegro

Tara river gorge

Podgorica, the captital of Montenegro, is a little weird but fantastic in a way

A memorial for the Russian singer-songwriter Wladimir Semjonowitsch Wyssozki

This year's big trip brought me to the Balkans, which I had been longing to visit for a long time. We started in Budapest and travelled to Belgrade via Novi Sad, Serbia, by train and bus. This is the first batch of photos from the voyage ...

At the beginning of October I was participating a wine harvest in the Mosel/Saar region, a very beautiful, lush and picturesque part of Germany in between the rivers Mosel and Saar, close to the Luxemburg and french border. We were invited by vintners Matz and Jonas Hild to help pick their special Elbling grapes, the most famous of a collection of home made wines. We spent a whole day on their vineyards and followed the first steps of their production line. It's a small over 100 years old family run business and they are shipping their bottles around the world. A New York restaurant owner calls the Elbling wine, this special grape of the southern wine Mosel, "Mineral Water from Heaven", and I can only agree with that ;) It's been a very interesting weekend. Check out the photos ...

The grapes get all hand picked in the vineyards.

When the mini tractor stops working due to a bursted oil hose you have to go carry with classic baskets ;)

Jonas and Matz Hild with one of the workers

You can of course try and convince yourself in the field :)

And even try some wine during a break.

We filled six of those tubs this day.

Perfect grapes

It's much easier with the tractor.

Jonas Hild in the vineyard

The crew

The harvest goes onto the scale.

We collected 2,5 tones of grapes this day. And the relatives liked it.

The grapes will be pre-hackeled and go into the winepress next to it.

From there the fresh juice goes straight into the wine cellar to be further processed.

A really old tank from inside

Work done

That's it for now. I of course got a big box of wine shipped to Berlin and I'm eager to try the bottles that we picked.

Check out their website or facebook page and make sure to try a bottle of Elbling one day, it's worth it!